EfficientWP Hosting Customers

Logging In

To edit your WordPress website, you need to log in through a web browser. The URL is typically your website URL, followed by a slash and the text wp-login.php. For example, http://example.com/wp-login.php. If you are working from a draft site and your website has not been launched yet, then the URL will be in a different form.

Use your username and password to log in. You can check the box next to “Remember Me” to save your login information in your web browser so you do not have to retype your username and password the next time you want to edit your website. Do not do this if you are using a public computer. If you forgot your password, there is a “Lost your password?” link. Click the “Log In” button to go to your website dashboard.

The WordPress Dashboard

When you log in to edit your website, you enter what is known as the backend. This is where you can make all changes to your website. It is organized into various menus, which you can access from the left side of the backend.

The first menu is your Dashboard. The dashboard is typically the first page that you will see when you log into your website. Some plugins will activate widgets, or panels, on your dashboard.

The Administration Menu

These menu items appear down the left side of your WordPress backend.

  • Dashboard: where you arrive when you log in to your WordPress website. It displays a snapshot of your website.
  • Posts: where you manage your blog posts. If you are not using posts on your website, you will not need to use this menu.
  • Media: where you manage the files you upload to your website, such as images, audio, video, documents, and PDFs.
  • Links: where you manage the links on your sidebar. If you are not using a list of links on your sidebar, you will not need to use this menu.
  • Pages: where you manage the pages on your website. For most websites, this will be the menu you will visit the most.
  • Comments: where you manage the comments on your website. If you are not allowing comments to be submitted on your website, you will not need to use this menu.
  • Genesis: where you manage the design and SEO settings on your website, if you have a Genesis theme activated.
  • Appearance: where you switch themes and manage widgets.
  • Plugins: where you activate and deactivate plugins on your website.
  • Users: where you manage your user profile and add, edit, or delete additional users to edit your website. You can assign different levels of permission.
  • Tools: where you perform some of the more technical tasks related to your website. You will rarely need to use this menu.
  • Settings: where you edit your website settings. You will rarely need to use this menu.

Training Videos

You can access training videos for learning the basics of WordPress by logging into your WordPress site and going to the Video Tutorials menu on the left side. If you don’t see these, please contact us and we’ll enable them for you.

Using Your Own Domain Name

Typically, we will handle this process for you. You can contact us when you’re ready to make your site live, and we’ll configure it to work with the domain name of your choice. In most cases we can change your domain DNS for you if you give us the login to your domain registrar. But if you prefer to change your DNS yourself, you can follow the instructions for setting up your domain registrar. Before making any of these changes, make sure you confirm with us that we’ve configured the site on EfficientWP hosting to accept your domain name.

After the DNS changes are made, you may need to wait a few hours, depending on your domain registrar, before the new domain name is active. You will then be able to log into your website at yourdomain.com/wp-login.php (replacing “yourdomain.com” with your domain name).

You can follow the instructions for your particular domain registrar:

GoDaddy

  1. Visit My Account.
  2. Next to Domains, click the Launch button.
  3. Click the top menu DNS > DNS Manager.
  4. Click Edit Zone next to the domain.
  5. Go to the section for A (Host). Find the entry for the Host (A).
  6. Change the “points to” to 66.175.208.10.

NameCheap

When you click to manage your domain in NameCheap, scroll down the page and make sure the “NAMESERVERS” section is set to “NameCheap default.” If not, then you’ll need to change it to “NameCheap default”. Note: be sure you want to do this, as it will break the links to where your website, email, etc. currently point to. If you need to keep some of the existing DNS records intact, you’ll need to copy them and re-add them once the nameservers are pointed back to NameCheap.

Once the nameservers are pointed to NameCheap, you can click on the “Advanced DNS” tab. There, you can add, edit, and delete records.

If you want the non-www domain as your main domain, then find the record with the Host value of “@”. If that doesn’t exist, then add a new record and set the Host value to “@”. Make sure the Type is set to “A Record”. The Value is the IP address of the web hosting server. If you’re hosting with EfficientWP, that IP address is “66.175.208.10”.

If you want to redirect the www subdomain to the main domain (recommended in most cases), then find the record with the Host value of “www”. Make sure the Type is set to “CNAME Record”. The Value is your domain name, without the “http://” and with a period at the end (i.e. “yourdomain.com.”).

namecheap-records

1&1

  1. Click on domain.
  2. Click to expand DNS Settings.
  3. Click the Edit button.
  4. Go to Advanced DNS Settings and change “IP address (A Record)” to “Other IP address.”
  5. In the box next to “IPv4 Address,” enter 66.175.208.10.
  6. Click Save.